WASHINGTON — The scattered agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community are about to get a new leader. The question is: Will that person have enough authority to make them follow?

On Tuesday, the House broke a monthlong stalemate and approved legislation to overhaul the nation’s intelligence system. The Senate is expected to follow suit today.

But the compromises that went into creating a director of national intelligence have left many government officials and espionage experts skeptical that key reforms will amount to more than an administrative reshuffling — or will make the nation any safer.

Although the director will have substantial say over the budgets of the nation’s 15 spy agencies, the definition of the job’s authority was watered down during congressional negotiations. As a result, the ultimate success of the spy chief will depend in large part on bureaucratic skill and the level of support provided by President Bush.

“Unless the president really gets behind the new director and, in effect, tells the (agency heads) they’ve got to cede authority” to whoever gets the job, the intelligence chief is likely to struggle, said retired Navy Adm. Stansfield

Experts skeptical of intelligence chief’s clout

Turner, who served as CIA director under President Carter.

The new director will have a say in hiring the heads of intelligence agencies, but no clear authority to fire them. He or she can move money from one agency to another to meet the needs of the war on terrorism and other challenges, but always subject to strict limits.

Above all, the new structure has the president’s chief intelligence adviser several bureaucratic layers removed from the analysts and clandestine operators who actually gather and try to make sense of enemy secrets.

As a result, current and former intelligence officials said, the new director will have significant leverage but will face a struggle in the federal bureaucracy.

Turner stressed that he had not fully examined the 600-plus page reform bill but said he was “not comfortable at this point that they’re giving the director of national intelligence adequate authority.”

Indeed, the California lawmaker who had been the main obstacle to passage of the bill — House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon — said he had agreed to support the measure only after winning what he described as substantial curbs on the director’s powers.

Earlier versions of the legislation “had unlimited reprogramming authority — the DNI could take billions from the Department of Defense and move it to the FBI or other places,” Hunter said Tuesday. “We scaled that way back — to $150 million, but not more than 5 percent of any given program or agency.”

Similarly, Hunter said, the Senate version of the bill “had unlimited power to transfer personnel — we moved that back to 100 personnel.”

Hunter, who had opposed the bill over concerns that it would make spy agencies less responsive to the military, said that for him and other members of the Armed Services Committee, “this … was an exercise in control.”

Senate backers of the bill disagreed with the suggestion that it had been weakened. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and was one of the lead negotiators on the legislation, said language added in recent days to assuage Hunter’s concerns “would in no way weaken the authorities of the new director of national intelligence.”

She called the measure “the most significant reforms of our intelligence community in more than 50 years.”

The White House has not indicated whom Bush intends to nominate, but many in the intelligence community expect the job to go to CIA chief Porter J. Goss. The former Florida congressman has been at the helm at the CIA since September.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Tuesday that “we don’t speculate on personnel matters.” A CIA spokesman also declined comment.

The overhaul legislation prohibits the national intelligence director from serving simultaneously as director of the CIA. But a provision would allow the new chief to be based at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., until 2006, officials said.

The bill, formally known as the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, seeks to transform a U.S. spy community that was built largely to confront the challenges of the Cold War. The measure calls for the creation of a national counterterrorism center, requires greater intelligence sharing among agencies, stiffens visa requirements and adds thousands of new border patrol and customs agents.

Many involved in drafting the legislation have said that the key component is the creation of a national director, charged with setting priorities and preventing the sorts of intelligence breakdowns that plagued U.S. efforts in the months leading up to Sept. 11.

The idea gained momentum in Congress only when it was one of the top recommendations of the independent Sept. 11 Commission.

Until now, the CIA director was supposed to coordinate the activities of all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. But the Sept. 11 panel concluded that CIA directors rarely have devoted much attention to that part of their job because of the demands of running the agency.

In its report, the Sept. 11 Commission cited a memo that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet wrote in December 1998 declaring war on al-Qaida and instructing other agencies to spare no effort in confronting Osama bin Laden’s network.

“Most of the directors in the various intelligence agencies never saw the memo, never heard about it and probably never would have shifted a dime anyway because the CIA director couldn’t tell them what to do,” said former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, a member of the Sept. 11 panel.

A new director of national intelligence may be in a better position to command the attention of other agency chiefs, largely because he or she will have authority to “develop and determine” their annual budgets.

But Congress whittled away at other powers that the Sept. 11 panel had urged. For example, although the commission said that the director should have the power to hire and fire the agency chiefs, the final bill gives the director only “the right to concur in (their) appointment.”

And rather than have explicit control over how agencies spend their money, the director is to “monitor the implementation and execution” of such spending and report problems to the president and Congress.

Several officials voiced concern that having the president referee such disputes is likely to favor powerful players in the administration, particularly Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was asked by Bush last week to serve a second term.

Many of the provisions in the bill amount to “throwing the ball back in the president’s camp,” Turner said. “And I’m very worried because it appears this president won’t buck Rumsfeld.”

Several officials acknowledged that the structure of the national intelligence director position likely would remain a work in progress, but they insisted that the reforms would improve the performance of the intelligence community and make the country safer.

(Click here if you are unable to view this photo gallery on your mobile device) The Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek celebrates the life of its founder Ruth Bancroft who died at 109 on November 26, 2017. The Ruth Bancroft Garden is a nonprofit public dry garden that was planted by Mrs. Ruth Bancroft in 1972 and was opened to the...